10 January 2014

Your country needs you

WikiCommons: Public domain image - Alfred Leete

Some of the loose
change in our purses or pockets will soon have the iconic image of Lord
Kitchener's handlebar moustache and pointing finger. The Royal Mint chose his
picture for the £2 coin commemorating the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of
the First World War.

At the same time Michael Gove, the secretary of state for
education, has called for a more positive appraisal World War One in the school
history curriculum. As the anniversary approaches we seem intent on taking
sides rather than being open to learning from the past.

Six weeks ago, on the
first Sunday of Advent, I was preaching in the French town of Reims and began
to question my own view of World War One. The Protestant church in Reims was
rebuilt after having been completely destroyed by German bombs during the 'great
war for civilisation'. I realised how much my own approach to the war
fought on French, Belgian and Eastern European soil was formed not by Blackadder but by British poets, writers and novelists. Experiencing in person and not only on a map,
just how far into France the German advance had reached made me think again.

One of my grandfathers
fought in the Great War. He was already 24 in 1914 and must have been a student
or trainee lawyer at the time that he enlisted or was conscripted. I know
almost nothing about where he fought. There is some vague family memory of him
being decorated for his war service, but it was the long-term aftermath of the
war, the inability to make a lasting and meaningful peace internationally and
at home that affected his life story much more. I do know enough of my
grandfather's story to say that the buckle on his military belt was embossed
with the words "God with us", though it was written in German: "Gott mit uns",
because he was born in Danzig, in what was then Prussia and is now Poland.

A convert to
Christianity, my grandfather had four Jewish grandparents. Despite having served
his country when it needed him, he was put in a concentration camp for six
weeks following the Nazi's Kristallnacht "night of broken glass" in November
1938. He was fortunate that some feisty people in Britain were willing to put
their names to immigration papers in 1939 for each of the four members of the
family – one person who signed was a Quaker, another was an evangelical
Anglican, another a socialist lawyer.

Reparations against Germany
following the war were vengeful, reflecting the reparations and humiliation France
experienced at the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Only after the
horrors of World War Two did some kind of understanding emerge that the only
coinage that has real value in the aftermath of war is rebuilding:
institutions, countries and communities.

War is always somehow
fascinating, yet utterly appalling. In its wake comes instability, revolutions
and mass displacement of peoples. Yet we continue to hear arguments about how
it is 'inevitable' or 'just'. The scale of it is often too much to take in,
strange details stick in our mind. For me it's that two out of five adult
British males at the time were not fit enough to serve in the army and the
reminder that many of the men who died for their country did not even have the
right to vote, since full adult male suffrage was achieved only in 1918.

So I wonder does it
really honour those who fought and died a hundred years ago to say 'we were
right'? Surely war is almost always the sign of something being wrong, of a
failure: of democracy, of diplomacy, of community, of the economy … The 1914-18
war plunged large swathes of Europe into revolution, regime-change and the
redrawing of borders. Will we have the humility and generosity in our
remembering to reappraise what 'we' got wrong?

Recently I met a
Syrian friend. She watches from a far country as her family is repeatedly
displaced within the country.It is
desperate. And yet she said to me: "I do not want to say or do anything now
that will not help reconciliation and peace in the future." Holding on to that
kind of hope for tomorrow requires a very determined kind of courage.

In my purse I have
currency from countries I regularly travel between: euros, pounds and Swiss
francs, lots of coins. Whether it is Caesar's head or Kitchener's on the coins,
I am called to follow the God of Jesus Christ. To set my feet on the path of
peace I need the moral courage to remember the past in new ways. To heal
memories. Who knows, it may even help make the future possible.

Jane Stranz is the ecumenical officer for the
Protestant Federation of France

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